There are some staunch Modern Greeks out there that still don´t get it! Being told that you are a "Greek" or pretending to be a Greek does not really make you a Greek, at least not the kind of Greek you think you are!

We have shown over and over again that "anyone" can become a Greek by accepting the "Greek indoctrination" and that is to learn to speak the Greek language, feel Greek and "pretend" to be a descendent of the so-called "Ancient Greeks". You can learn to speak Greek and feel Greek as much as you want but you can´t "pretend" to be something you are not! People should not "pretend" to be something they are not if they want to be taken seriously! Acting like you are the descendents of the so-called "Ancient Greeks", speaking their language and feeling like them does not make you the descendants of the Ancient Greeks! It would be to your advantage to not only learn "the truth" about yourselves but to either embrace it or accept to reject it. Modern Greeks are the descendents of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs that immigrated to Greece during the 11th to the 14th centuries AD and all other people that subsequently settled in that region ever since.

The ancient Greeks that you think of and speak of so fondly died off even before Romeconquered Achaea (Greece proper) about two centuries before Christ. When the Romans walked into Athens they found a population made up mostly of slaves. These slaves became the new citizens of Achaea after they were freed by Rome. Unfortunately they too perished over time and that is precisely why Byzantine Emperors and later Ottoman Sultans had to repopulate Achaea first with Slav immigrants and later with Albanians and Vlachs.

Therefore the true ancestors of the Modern Greeks are the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs and all others that landed in Greece since the disappearance of the so-called ancient Greeks.

Here is evidence from fifty different authors that proves my point that Modern Greeks today are NOT the descendents of the "Ancient Greeks" and are the descendents of the Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs.

1. "The [Greek] claim to southern Albania rests entirely on the assumption that the majority of the population is Greek. The Greeks are stated to number 120,000 and Albanians 80,000. But who are the ´Greeks´? At least five sixths of them, if not more are Christian Albanians of the Orthodox faith, Albanians in sentiment and language, who because they acknowledge the Patriarch of Constantinople are declared to be Greek in point of ´national consciousness´."
("The Nineteenth Century and After XIX-XX a Monthly Review", founded by James Knowles, Vol. LXXXVI, July-December 1919, page 645.)

2. "Did the Greeks constitute a race apart from the Albanians the Slavs and the Vlachs? Yes and no. High school students were told that the ´other races´, i.e. the Slavs the Albanians and the Vlachs ´having been Hellenized with the years in terms of mores and customs, are now being assimilated into the Greeks´."
("Greece in the 20th Century", Editors Theodore A. Couloumbis, Theodore Kariots, Fotini Bellou, page 24.)

3. "The Turkish village which formally clustered around the base of the Acropolis [old Athens] has not disappeared: it forms a whole quarter of the town.An immense majority of the population in this quarter is composed of Albanians."
("Greece and the Greeks of the Present Day", by Edmund About, page 160.)

4. "Through the end of the revolution in 1830, Greeks, including most of the nineteenth-century nationalists, seemed to have had a vague but firm sense of continuity from ancient to modern Greece, though this was not articulated in racial terms but on the basis of a common language, history and consciousness. In effect at this time, whoever called themselves a Greek was a Greek. It is because of this that many Greek-speaking Albanians, Slavs, Rumanians and Vlachs were easily assimilated and indeed became important players in Greek patriotism at the time." ("The Empty Cradle of Democracy", by Alexandra Halkias, page 59.)

5. "The first Greek who had a plan for insurrection and for a liberated Greece was Rhigas of Valestino.Rhigas was the author of poems, revolutionary proclamations and a constitution… In this document he spoke of a sovereign people of the proposed state as including ´without distinction of religion and language – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other race´. It seems that in their minds the distinction between ´Greek´ and ´Orthodox´ was still blurred."
("Appleton´s Annual Cyclopedia and register of important events 1901", Third Series Volume VI, page 113.)

6. "There cannot be an Athenian alive today who can trace a direct line of descent from classical times to the present day without leaving Athens. Because of numerous and protracted foreign occupations, true Athenians were a relatively small minority even in the Age of Pericles. In a later period, the city was suffering from severe depopulation and was re-stocked with Albanians. At the time of Greek independence in 1834, Athens was a miserable village with a population of only 6,000." ("Insight Guides Athens Greece Series", page 42.)

7. "It is one of a group made famous in the Greek revolution of 1821 by the bravery of its Albanian settlers, in defense of a country which they had never adopted for their own till this moment of danger came.They brought to it moreover, the hoarded wealth of many years. Albanian captains, Albanian ships and Albanian gold became the strength of the Greek and the dread of the Turk. The successful close of the revolution found them as firmly allied with the Greek nationality as they have been previously alien to it, and there are now no names more honoured and beloved in Athens, no families more influential in its polite circles, than those of the Albanian leaders in the war of 1821, the Tombazis, the Miaulis the Condouriottis."
("The Atlantic Monthly: A magazine of literature, science, art and politics Vol. XLIX, January 1882, page 31.)

8. "Among the numerous islands of the Egian, arise several barren rocks, some of which are however gifted by nature with small and commodious heavens. Of this number are Hydra, Spezzia and Ipsara, the first two close to the Eastern shore of the Peloponnesus, and the latter not far from Scio, on the Asiatic coast. Tyranny and Want had driven some families, whose origin, like that of nearly all the peasants, who inhabited proper Greece, was Albanian, to take refuge on these desolate crags, where they built villages and sought a precarious existence by fishing."

9. "In reality however, just before the Greek war of independence, most Greeks still referred to themselves as ´Romans. Vlachavas, the priest rebel leader who rose against the Ottomans, declared, ´A Romneos I was born a Romneos I will die."

("Bloodlines from the Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism", by Vamik Volkan, page 121.)

10. "Constantinople and all continental Greece were for centuries ruled and occupied by the Romans, and during many subsequent centuries invaded and colonized by Slavs. The Crusades and the Latin conquest brought a large influx of western Europeans, commonly called Franks, and, in later times, extensive Albanian settlements were made in Greek districts. Clearly, the modern Greek must be of very mixed blood."

("Turkey in Europe" by Sir Charles Elliot, page 267.)

11. "But it has been argued that since the modern day Greeks are not the descendents of the ancient Greeks: ´The Star of Vergina is not a Greek symbol, except in the sense that it happens to have been found in the territory of the present-day Greek state…´."

13. "By the fourteenth century Orthodox Christian Arvanites had made their way into the Greek thema of the Byzantine Empire, which largely comprised the land that now constitutes Greece. They first came to Attica as early as 1883…They did not complete their immigration until 1759, when Sultan Murat III offered them land in Athens…Thus the Arvanites were already inhabiting Athens when the city became the capital of Greece in 1834."

("Fragments of Death Fables of Identity An Athenian Anthropography" by Nani Panourgia, page 27.)

14. "I have already said, and I will repeat it, that not one-fifth of the present population can with justice be called Greeks. The remainder are Slavonians, Albanians and Turks, with a slight infusion of Venetian blood."

("Travels in Greece and Russia", by Bayard Tailor, 1872, page 262.)

15. "It should be stressed, however, that the Greeks as an ethnic community during this period [1840´s] included many Grecophone or Hellenized Vlachs, Serbs or Orthodox Albanians."

("Greece and the Balkans Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment", edited by Dimitris Tziovas, page6.)

16. "All Greek soldiers are required to be able to read and write, and if a conscript on joining has not acquired those rudiments of education, he is put to school. Not withstanding, the educational efforts of the government, as many as 30 percent proven fifteen years or so ago to be completely illiterate, while not more than 25 per cent had advanced beyond the ´three R´s´. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that these conscripts included both Albanians from the settlements in Attica and other parts of the Kingdom and pastoral Koutso-Vlachs, all of whom habitually speak their own dialects and learn Greek only as a foreign tongue."

17. "I could speak Turkish, and the Macedonian dialect, besides my own Greek tongue, and as a curious boy in the holidays I had been here and there, wishing to know more of the world round me and the people who lived in other villages than mine.Being neither Turkish nor Greek, we called them Bulgarian, but their language is not Bulgarian, but the Macedonian dialect, and I found lovable people among them, honest, hospitable and kind."
("When I was a Boy in Greece" by George Demetrios, pages 131 and 132.)

18. "The migration of the Albanians is the best attested and in many ways the most instructive of migrations into Greece….We had difficulty staying because they were rather suspicious of us, but we stayed with a man who talked Greek as his main language, although he talked to his wife in Albanian… The ancestors of these people probably came to the Epidaurus in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but they were still talking Albanian as their mother tongue in 1930…. Albanian was the language they talked among themselves, but they could also talk Greek. This was their second language although they lived in Greece…. The one in Epirus which was still Albanian in its customs and its language had probably been there since about 1400… A group of 10,000 Albanians with their families and their flocks appeared there, and asked if they could be admitted to the Peloponnesus. They were accepted by Theodore, who was the principle ruler of the Peloponnesus…"
("Greece Old and New", by Nicholas Hammond, edited by Tom Winnifrith and Penelope Murray, Pages 39 to 44.)

19. "…so, in the Middle Ages, these Albanian mountaineers have brought both war like spirit, bright costume, and beauty of person, to refresh the Hellenic race. There are still, even in Attica, districts where Albanian is the common language; there are Albanian names famous in Greek annals, especially in the great war of independence (1821-1831) and even among the sailors of Hydra, so famed for their commercial enterprise and their deeds of war, the chief families were Albanian in origin."

20. "Groups of men in stately Albanian costume, with their grand walk and graceful air, stalk up and down with eastern impassibility, price an article, call for a ´fotia´ (brazier of coals for lighting cigarettes) , at the cafés, or converse in the strange patois of Greece about the last conclusion of the ´vouli´ or house of delegates."

("Greek Vignettes a sail in the Greek Seas, Summer of 1877", by James Albert Herrison, page 148.)

21. "In the 1770´s a fiery Orthodox preacher, the monk Kosmas of Aetolia, tried to stem the tide of mass conversions to Islam in the Northern Greek lands by founding Greek schools in a score of villages in Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia, where the language had long been abandoned for Albanian, Vlach or Slav, and obliged peasants to speak only Greek."

("Greece the Modern Sequel from 1821 to the Present", by John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis, page 159.)

22. "…following the alleged discovery of Slavic buildings by the German excavator at Olympia. The claims were answered by Paparrigopoulos himself, by reinstating his 1843 position that there was indeed a Slavic presence in the Peloponnesus in the Middle Ages, but that the Greeks need not worry because the Slavs were culturally absorbed…"

("The Nation and its Ruins", by Yannis Hamilakis, page 115.)

23. "In 1358 the Albanians overran Epirus, Acarnania and Anatolia and established two principalities under their leaders…Naupactas fell into their control in 1378… Other Albanians and Vlachs invaded the Catalan principality of Boeotia and Attica, and a great many Albanians settled there as peasant-farmers in 1368 and later…. The penetration of the Greek mainland which we have described occurred during the hundred or more years after 1325."
("Migrations and Invasions in Greece and Adjacent Areas", by Nicholas G. L. Hammond, page 59.)

24. "When arriving by airplane at Athens, one lands at the new airport at Spata. Spata is a town situated in the Messogia region that bears and Arvanite name that means ´axe´ or ´sword´ (in Greek ´spaps´, spaya from which derives the Albanian Spata). The term ´Arvanite´ is the medieval equivalent of ´Albanian´. It is retained today for the descendants of the Albanian tribes that migrated to the Greek lands during the period covering two centuries, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth."

25. "With them it would be a resurrection, accomplished, no doubt, after vast pains and many troubles, the more so since the Greeks are a composite people among whom the descendents of the veritable Greeks of old are in great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Suliot blood, races which even the Romans found untamable."

("In Greek Waters: a story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827), by G. A. Henty, 1893, page 40.)

26. "Where are we to look for the descendents of the Greeks of old? Travelers tell us that, as late as the sixteenth century, Athens was but a castle with a small village; and that Sparta, divided by two tribes of the Slavi, the Ezeriti and the Milingi, had not only lost her ancient name, but it was impossible to recognize the site in which she had stood of old."

("History of the Island of Corfu" by Henry Jervis-White Jervis ESQ., page 250.)

27. "General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of modern Greeks. The war of Independence had won the sympathy of Europe; and it was a rude shock both to Greece and to her champions when Fallmerayer announced that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of the Hellenes he declared in his ´History of the Morea´ was routed out, and Athens was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people had ever existed. What the Slavs had began the Albanians completed."

28. "There were few Muslims here; the inhabitants largely of Albanian stock, were only imperfectly assimilated into the Greek nation…" ("Politics in Modern Greece", by Keith R. Legg, page 48.)"The term ´Greek´ differentiates the language spoken by inhabitants of modern Greece from the languages of the surrounding countries; but there is disagreement on what the Greek language was, is, or should be. At the time of independence, the range of local dialects was significant; substantial portions of the population spoke Albanian."
("Politics in Modern Greece", by Keith R. Legg, page 86.)

29. "…followed by violence, recourse was had to arms, and the two elder brothers united against Vely, the offspring of a slave; who being forced to expatriate himself, embraced the perilous profession of those Albanian knights errant, more commonly known by the appellation of kleftes or brigands."

("The Life of Ali Pasha of Jannina, 1823, page 26.)

30. "There is the case of Karamanlides, a predominantly Turkish-speaking Christian Orthodox people, who were forced to go to Greece although they did not necessarily identify ´ethnically´ with the Greeks. At the time of the exchange they numbered as many as 400,000."

31, "Morea…as Fallmerayer traces it back to the Slavic word ´more´, the sea which nearly encircles the Morea. The Morea forms the most southern part of the Kingdom of Greece and is divided into the monarchies of Argolis, Corinth, Lakonis, Messenia, Archadia, Achaea and Elis.Overrun by the Goths and Vandals, it became prey, in the second half of the 8th c. to bands of Slavic invaders who found it wasted by war and pestilence."
("International Cyclopedia a Compendium of Human Knowledge", American Editor-in-Chief Richard Gleason Green, 1890, page 204.)

32. "This point is made in almost all publications on Albanian nationalism (e.g. Skendi 1967 and 1980). In the nineteenth century, the Greek historian Constantinos Paparrigopoulos considered the Albanians a ´race´ that could be acculturated into Hellenism. His viewpoint was greatly influenced by the considerable Albanian contribution to the Greek war of independence (1821-1828)."

33. "Rhigas of Valentino….author of poems, revolutionary proclamations and a constitution…In this document he spoke of a sovereign people of the proposed state as including ´without distinction of religion and language – Greeks, Albanians, Vlachs, Armenians, Turks and every other race´."
("Nations and States", by Hugh Seton-Watson, page 113.)

34. "As of 2002 more than 98,000 foreign pupils were enrolled in Greek schools, accounting for almost 9 percent of the overall school population. As regards nationality, 72 percent are from Albania.Clearly, Albanians are not unknown to Greeks and the new relationships emerging from the contemporary migratory context can be seen as superimposing themselves into a pre-existing trans-Balkan context."
("The New Albanian Migration", edited by Russell King, Nicola Mai and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, page 155.)

35. "Next to them in this respect are the modern Greeks, who, for the most part, are of Sclavonian origin, and, where they are not purely Sclavonian, are a cross-breed in which Sclavonian enters very largely."

("The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science for the year 1843", Vol. XIV, page 246.)

36. "The modern Greeks are largely of Slavic origin. They are not the descendents of the ancient Greeks. That noble race, greatly mixed with barbarian blood during the middle ages, was almost completely destroyed in the course of the frequent uprisings against Turkish rule. Slavic immigrants gradually repopulated the country."

37. "There was little interest as to the nationality of the rayahs while Turkish rule was strong. They were nearly all Christians of the Byzantine type, those in Europe at least, and were hence regarded as one people, for oriental theocracy cannot conceive of nationality apart from religion. They themselves knew the differences in their origins and in such traditions as they had: some were Slavs, some Vlachs and some Albanians…"

38. "Since the Christian era, as we have said, a successive downpour of foreigners from the north into Greece has ensued. In the sixth century came the Avars and the Slavs, bringing death and disaster. A more potent and lasting influence upon the country was probably produced by the slower and more peaceful infiltration of the Slavs into Thessaly and Epirus from the end of the seventh century onward.The most important immigration of all is probably that of the Albanians, who, from the thirteenth century until the advent of the Turks incessantly overran the land."
("The Races of Europe a Sociological Study", by William Z. Ripley PhD, 1910, page 408.)

("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, page 87.)"In the course of time the Hellenic blood was corrupted to a still greater extent. In 146 BC the Romans conquered Greece…When Mummius took Corinth…All the men were killed, the women and children were sold into slavery. Later the Goths invaded Greece…laid waste the land, and expelled or exterminated the inhabitants."

("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, pages 88 and 89.)"The only difference between modern Greeks and the other Balkanacs lies in the fact that the environment of the modern Greeks is the environment of the Hellenes. The environment, however, has no power whatsoever to change the mongrel into a race, and the Greeks have not been changed by it." ("Race or Mongrel", by Alfred P. Schultz, page 93.)

40. "The ethnographic record certainly shows that Rhigas could have identified as both Vlach and Greek, and even preferred one over another in different circumstances. The Koutsovlach contribution to Greek independence is well attested."

("Modern Greece a Cultural Poetics", by Vangelis Calotychos, page 44.)"He consequently never traveled to Greece to implement the second part of his plan. Like many Philhellenes and Diaspora figures Rhigas never did set foot in Greece, which was fitting for one whose image of the place bore many characteristics of a European discourse located and produced outside of the Greek mainland."

41. "In the last year of the 15th century, and the opening years of the 16th, when the Morea was again the battlefield of the Turks and Venetians, the occupants of the plain of Argos and portions of Attica were practically exterminated, and Albanian colonists began to reoccupy the lands."

("The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece", by Rennell Rodd, 1892, page 17.)

42. "Modern Greece is so flimsy and fragile, that it goes to pieces entirely when confronted with the roughest fragment of the old. But there is very little of it, and if you choose you may see exactly what the Greeks of the 5th century saw, and, the people of Athens are, of course, no more Athenian than I am."

("In Byron´s Shadow Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination", by David Roessel, page 163.)

43. "This revival also allowed the Byzantines to re-colonize the Greek mainland. The success of that effort would prove crucial to the survival of Greek culture in future centuries, after the other lands had fallen away. Having overrun nearly all the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece have been converted to Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized."

("Sailing from Byzantium How a Lost Empire Shaped the World", by Colin Wells, page 184.)

44. "The Vlachs, on the contrary, descendents of the Romanized people of the Balkan peninsula, live in considerable numbers in the mountains of northern and central Greece."

("The Scottish Geographical Magazine", volume XIII, 1897, page 370.)

45. "Europe´s affinity with ancient Greece left the newborn nation of Greece in an awkward double bind. Identifying ancient Greece as the ´childhood of Europe´ Winkelmann gave the patrimony of Greece to western Europe, leaving only more modern sights of heritage to the modern Greeks. Michael Herzfeld suggests that ´the west supported the Greeks on their implicit assumption that the Greeks would reciprocally accept the role of living ancestors of European civilization´."

("Possessors and Possessed", by Wendy M. K. Shaw, page 66.)

46. "It is simply not plausible to suggest that the bulk of Greek speaking Roman citizens in the Middle Ages, let alone the former Turkish subjects of 19th century Greece, ´lived like, ancient Greeks."

("Macedonia and Greece the Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation", by John Shea, page 95.)

47. "Not less remarkable than the small size of Hellas was the small size of the Hellenes themselves. But it is much more easy to trace the boundaries of the one upon the modern map than it is to trace the blood of the other in the bodies of the modern inhabitants.We have no accurate record of the proportions of free citizens who alone constituted the true Hellenes, but they were at most a small minority among the large population of helots and slaves."
("The Nineteenth Century a Monthly Review", edited by James Knowles, Vol. VI, July-December 1879, page 932.)

48. "The Albanians of Hydra and Spatsae, many of whom could not even speak Greek, regarded themselves as Greek because their allegiance was with the Orthodox Church."

("That Greece Might Still be Free", by William St. Clair, page 9.)

49. "Here is the ultimate Greek tragedy: that of a country forced to treat everything familiar at the time of the nation-state´s foundation as ´foreign´ while importing a culture largely invented – or at least – redesigned by German classicists of the late eighteenth early nineteenth centuries. For many decades, and almost without interruption, Greeks were forced to put aside music, art and language that were deemed too tainted by the ´oriental´ influences of Ottoman, Arab, Slavic and Albanian culture; to forget the partially Albanian roots of Athens and its environs…"

("The Body Impolitic" by Michael Herzfeld, page 9.)

50. "The philhellenes – the word means ´the admirers of the Greeks´ – who began to lobby for Greek freedom were struck by the contrast between the idea of ancient Greek freedom and the servitude of the modern Greeks, who were usually assumed to be direct descendents of Pericles and company. Philhellenes generally moved at a distance from reality: they were concerned only with the myth of Athens and were capable of ignoring anything which tended to tarnish the glamour."

("Athens from Ancient Ideal to Modern City", by Robin Waterfield, page 296.)

Given that the Modern Greeks are NOT the descendents of any "ancient people" as they pretend to be, then how do they justify the invasion, occupation, partition and annexation of Macedonian territories? How do they justify telling the Macedonians what they can and can´t call themselves? Why are these imposters and charlatans still being taken seriously? But, as long as we pay attention to them and argue with them, they will continue to argue back and to "pretend" that they are the descendents of the so-called Ancient Greeks.

For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue to read this series of articles.

Author´s note:
Dear Macedonians, one way to defend ourselves from the Greek onslaught and gain back our identity and dignity is to fight back to the level to which the Greeks have reduced us; that is to attack their identity as they have attacked ours. We need prove nothing to them except to expose them as the artificial identity they truly are and to uncover their design to wipe us out in order to usurp our Macedonian heritage.

If God himself came to earth and spoke to the Greeks and said "these people here are Macedonians" the Greeks would not believe him. If Greeks start believing that Macedonians exist in Greece then they will also have to believe that Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs also exist in Greece. If Macedonians, Slavs, Albanians and Vlachs exist in Greece then Greeks will be asking "who then are the Greeks?" And as I have found out in my quest for "searching for the Greeks", ethnically speaking, there are no Greeks.

But how can that be? The entire world knows that there is a country called Greece populated by 10 million Greeks who are 98% pure Greeks and 2% Muslim Greeks!

Well there are people who identify as "Greeks", unfortunately, ethnically speaking they are not "ethnic Greeks"; they are "politically" Greeks. Did I just say "politically Greeks"? Yes politically Greeks. They identify as Greeks not because "they are" ethnic Greeks but because they "want to be" Greeks! It´s a matter of choice. How else can one explain Slavs, Albanians, Vlachs, Macedonians, Christian Turks, Armenians, Russians and a whole group of other ethnicities ALL identifying as "Greeks"?

In other words, anyone can be Greek provided they agree with the "Philhellenic indoctrination" of what a Greek is. Anyone who speaks Greek, claims to be a descendent of the so-called Ancient Greeks, pretends to be superior to other people, claims minorities don´t exist in Greece, is arrogant and insensitive to non-Greeks and hurls slogans like "Macedonia is Greek" can be a Greek. Can an Asia Minor Christian Turk settler who was deposited in Macedonia in the 1920´s be a Greek? Yes they can! They can even be a Macedonian, descendent of the Ancient Macedonians! Can a Macedonian whose family identified as Macedonian before Greece annexed Macedonia in 1913 identify as a Greek? Yes they can, provided they accept and swear by the "Philhellene Indoctrination". Can any of my relatives, like myself who were born in Greece, with whom I share great grandparents be Greeks even though I identify as a Macedonian? Yes they can! They can in fact also be "full fledged" Macedonians, direct descendents of the Ancient Macedonians! Can I be a Greek, and I did ask this question, on account of some of my family members identifying as Greeks? The answer was a flat NO! And according to the same "Greek authorities" who said I could never be a Greek, I don´t even qualify to call myself Macedonian. According to them I am a "Slav" and a "Skopjan" from some "other" country called "Skopje", which I have yet to find on any "world" map except on maps made in Greece!

If you are still not convinced that the Greek identity is a 19th century Philhellene fabrication; an identity "created" purely for political purposes, then you had best read the following twenty-five excerpts;

51. "There were, however, several magnificent specimens of Greek palicars, who added to the advantage of soldier like, but rather swaggering carriage, all the accessories of their picturesque costume. Nine or ten of them performed the Albanian national dance, to the sound of a bad fiddle and a jingling guitar played with a quill for the amusement of her majesty, who did not seem enchanted with this exhibition.

And these men, who were exposing themselves in this absurd manner, were the far-famed Colocotroni, Nikitas, surnamed the Turkofagos, or Turk eater, Makryani, Vasso of Montinegro, Nota Botsaris, and other equally celebrated."
("Blackwood´s Edinburgh Magazine", Vol. XLIII, January – June 1838)

52. "When Athens was chosen as the site for the modern capital of the new nation, and its (re)construction was planned along lines of Hellenic purity, the unsettling evidence of Greece´s Ottoman heritage along with local vernacular forms had to be confronted, all the more so when situated in the immediate vicinity of remains of classical antiquity. Early nineteenth-century Athens was viewed as a ´disgraceful site´ (Boyer 1996: 163) full of imperfections, ranging from the city´s physical aspect to the spoken language that called for, ´filtering-out´ interventions."

53. "In 1851, at the time of her enfranchisement, Greece possessed about one million inhabitants, of whom a quarter were Albanians or Walachians. The population was a residue of invaders of all peoples, and notable of Slavs. For centuries the Greeks properly so called had disappeared from Greece. From the time of the Roman conquest, Greece was regarded by every adventurer as a nursery of slaves, which everyone might have recourse to with impunity."

("The Psychology of Socialism", by Gustav Lo Bon, page 206)

54. "The Greek influence which has partially Hellenized the Vlachs of Macedonia to-day can hardly date from before the Turkish conquest. It is the work not of the Byzantine Empire but of the modern Church, and seems to have reached its height during the eighteenth century."

("Macedonia its races and the future", by H. N. Brailsford , page 181)

55. "Greek statesman said Albanian was not a language – it had no literature, not even an alphabet - it is a mere patois, and would die out in a generation, and the children of the Albanian soldiers and sailors would all be good Greeks."

56. " We have many instances of the daring of these Greek robbers, one of which I shall here relate, as received from their chief, no less a personage than Colocotroni, who was in our service, and has since, as may be remembered, made himself conspicuous in Greece. He is an Albanian, and, as he acknowledges, a kleftis (robber)."

("Selections from my Journal during a residence in the Mediterranean", pages 110 and 111)

57. "…the historical absurdity of declaring Hellenic civilization the expression of a culture uncontaminated by foreign elements can be explained by a simple fact that tends to be disregarded – namely, that Hellenic civilization that we know it was in effect the invention of the ´Science of Antiquity´, of Classics. As such, it could have been (and was) endowed with whatever signification the discipline found useful."

("Dream Nation Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece", by Stathis Gourgouris, page 134)

58. "After successive treaties, (London 1913, Bucharest 1913), Greece acquired much of Macedonia, Epirus, Crete and the north-eastern islands of the Aegean. Greek land increased by 70 percent and the population almost doubled from 2,800,000 to 4,800,000 some of whom were Slavs and Turks."

59. "Yet so much of the Sclavonian element had been infused into the latter that the modern Greeks are found to differ widely from their remote ancestors."

("Foreign Quarterly Review", Vol. XXVI, 1841, page 73)

60. "…the question of Greece´s political and ethnic status generated a considerable amount of debate in western Europe. As Michael Herzfeld argues in ´Ours once more: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece´: ´to be a European, was in ideological terms, to be a Hellene´ (1982: 15). Many Europeans of the time, however, believed the contemporary Greeks to be an adulterated version of the Classical Greeks – ´Byzantine Slavs…"

61. "…since the Greeks are a composite people among whom the descendents of the veritable Greek of old are in a great minority. The majority are of Albanian and Solute blood, races which even the Romans found untamable."

("In Greek Waters: a Story of the Grecian War of Independence (1821-1827)", By G.A. Henty, 1893, page 40)

62. "General interest was first aroused by a controversy as to the racial derivation of modern Greeks. The War of Independence had won the sympathy of Europe; and it was a rude shock both to Greece and her champions when Fallmerayer announced that her inhabitants were virtually Slavs. The race of the Hellenes, he declared in his ´History of Morea´, was routed out and Athens was unoccupied from the sixth to the tenth century. Only its literature and a few ruins survived to tell that the Greek people ever existed. What the Slavs had begun the Albanians had completed."

("History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century", by G.P. Gooch, pages 490 and 491)

63. "Old Corinth passed through its various stages, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Turkish. After the War of Independence it was again Greek, and, being a considerable town, was suggested as the capital of the new Kingdom of Greece. The earthquake of 1858 leveled it to the ground with the exception of about a dozen houses. A mere handful of the old inhabitants remained on the site. But fertile fields and running water made it attractive; and outsiders gradually came in. At present, it is an untidy poverty-stricken village of about 1,000 inhabitants, mostly of Albanian Blood."

64. "The modern Greeks possess none of the qualities which make nations great. Their existence is due to the battle of Navarino, for in the autumn of 1827 Greece was unquestionably conquered by the arms of the Grand Vizier Reshid Mehmed and by Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, and again the ´untoward event´ of Navarino could only occur at a time when Phil-Hellenism was a sort of social disease, caused by hallucinations and by the illusion of finding in the present a mongrel inhabitants of the Morea and Attica the descendents of the ancient Hellenes."

("The Syrian War and the decline of the Ottoman Empire (1840-1848)", by Byron Augustus Jochmus, page 100)

65. "The notion of a ´Greek´ identity in the modern sense is itself in large part the creation of the movement towards statehood. It was not until the nineteenth century that the term came to describe a homogenous ethnic group in the modern sense. Instead, the people of the Peloponnesos, including Argolida, made up an intricate mosaic of ethnicities and languages. In Argolida dialects of Albanian, Greek, Turkish and other local languages were spoken (Andromedas 1976)."

66. "…Greek national feeling was already quite strong at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Even the Albanian-speaking Orthodox did not regard themselves only as Rum (members of the religious community or Orthodox Christian millet) but also as real Greeks."

67. "…he devoted his personal attention exclusively to the latter, assigning Joannina to his son-in-law, Thomas Preliubovich, in 1367, and Aetolia and Akarnania to two Albanian chiefs, belonging to the clan Boua and Liosa – a name still to be found in the plans of Attica. Thus, about 1362, all north-west Greece was Albanian…"

("The Latins in the Lavant a History of Frankish Greece (1204-1566), by William Miller M.A., 1908, page 294)

68. "Overrun by the Goths and Vandals, it became a pay, by the second half of the 8th c., to bands of Slavic invaders, who found it wasted by war and pestilence. Gradually however, these barbarians were subdued and Grecianized by the Byzantine Emperors. Nevertheless the numerous names of places, Rivers, etc., in the Morea of Slavic origin, prove how firmly they had routed themselves, and that the Moreotes are anything but pure Greeks."

69. "…between a cheer and a whine, and presently their Imperial Majesties of Greece, cantered up the hill attended by four dignitaries, and as many equerries. The queen was dressed in a dark green riding-habit, black beaver with drooping feather, and veil. King Otho wore the Albanian costume of crimson, gold embroidered jacket and legs, white fustanela, with a richly chased saber belted over his shoulder."

("Scampavians from Gibil Tarek to Stamboul", by Harry Gringo, 1857)

70. "There was little interest as to the nationality of the Rayahs while Turkish rule was strong. They were nearly all Christians of the Byzantine type, those in Europe at least, and were hence regarded as one people, for oriental theocracy cannot conceive nationality apart from religion. They themselves know the difference in their origins and in such traditions as they had: some were Slavs, some Vlachs and some Albanians…; they were all non-Muslims, all Rayahs, and in a sense all Greeks."

("Political Science Quarterly", Columbia University, 1908, page 307)

71. "The revolution of 1821 has restored the ancient appellation ´Elines´, but as it is used chiefly by the inhabitants of Bavarian Greece, who perhaps don´t constitute more than one fourth of the Greek nation, it may safely be said that the mass of the people still call themselves ´Romaii´ and their language ´Romaiki´."

("A Romaik Grammar", by E.A. Sophocles, 1842, page iv)

72. "From their manners, their features and their names of many of their neighbouring places, I should be tempted to regard them [Mainiotes] proceeding of Sclavonian blood: many travelers pretend, however, to have discovered in these barbarous hordes traces of a Spartan origin."

("Recollections of a Classical Tour through various parts of Greece, Turkey and Italy made in the years 1818 and 1819", by Peter Edmund Laurent, 1821, page 182)

73. "The Greeks have not taken much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins. And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek but rather the illiterate descendents of Slavs and Albanian fishermen who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. The true philhellenists were the English – of whom Byron was the epitome – and the French, who were passionate to link themselves to the Greek ideal."

("The Pillars of Hercules" by Paul Thereoux, page 316)

74. "…Neohellenic Enlightenment sanctioned a selective tradition, with particular emphasis upon an imaginary classical antiquity, and sought to suppress what was deemed to be a ´non-significant tradition´, mainly the Byzantine and Ottoman legacy. Through this ideological management of the past, it achieved the displacement of a substance part of the history, memory and experience of those it sought to shape into modern Greeks."

("Tormented by History Nationalism in Greece and Turkey", by Umut Oskirimu and Spiros A. Sofos, page 24)

75. "There are two other difficulties involved in the history of the Turkish period. In tracing the movements of merchandise and men in the Balkan peninsula it is extremely difficult to differentiate the various races involved. Western travelers knew little, Turkish authorities cared less. Even the polyglot Vlachs themselves knew nor cared a great deal and until the rise of national conciousness at the end of the eighteenth century were probably quite happy with the label of Greek, which was good enough for outside observers."

("The Vlachs the History of a Balkan People", by T.J. Winnifrith, pages 124 and 125)

Well, we have learned that the Greek identity is not an "ethnic identity" at all but rather a "politically motivated artificial identity" created by the 19th century Philhellenes to serve some greater political purpose. We have learned that the 19th century Greeks, recent ancestors to today´s Greeks, were not "ethnic Greeks" at all. The majority belonged to the Slav, Albanian, Vlach and later Macedonian ethnic groups. In other words they became "Greek" either by force or by choice. This cannot be disputed!

What can be disputed however is the ownership of a heritage that does not belong to the Modern Greeks. For example Modern Greeks cannot claim the heritage of the so-called "ancient Greeks" as their own just because they call themselves "Greeks" and learned to behave like the Ancient Greeks. This is like saying that I can claim my neighbour´s father´s house if I changed my last name to match his and pretend to be my neighbour´s brother. Can I legally do that? Can I one day show up at my neighbour´s house and say "I am your brother and this house is mine"? Wouldn´t I have to prove my descent from the man I claim to be my father?

Well this is exactly what the Greeks are doing! With the help of a bunch of Westerners, they usurped the Ancient Greek heritage, which does not belong to them, and now they think they are the owners of Greece. Ah, but that´s not all! Since they annexed a large chunk of Macedonian land in 1913 by war, they also usurped the Macedonian heritage, that is, until they were challenged by the real Macedonians. They usurped the Macedonian heritage the same way they usurped the Greek heritage by "pretending" to be Macedonians, descendents of the Ancient Macedonians and by pushing the real Macedonians out into extinction. How clever is that?

I don´t think any Macedonian cares what the Greeks call themselves, who they are and who they "pretend" to be but they sure care when these "pretenders" try to lay claim to the Macedonian heritage especially at the expense of the real Macedonians! Sharing the ancient heritage is one thing but claiming it to be exclusively theirs, especially since it can be proven that they are imposters, is another.

We are faced with two problems when dealing with this issue. First, the Modern Greeks are not Greeks at all. They call themselves Greeks not because they are Greeks but because they want to be Greeks. There are benefits to being Greek. There is a country "Greece" to call their own, which should never have been created in the first place because such a country never existed before. Then there is that illustrious past with all its glory which should never have been "assigned" to a people who had nothing to do with it. Second, these same people were not only allowed to annex 51% of Macedonia but were given full rights to "assimilate" the Macedonian people, turning them into Greeks, and usurping the Macedonian heritage as their own. Hence the slogan "the Ancient Macedonians were Greek" therefore "the Modern Macedonians must also be Greek".

But wanting to be Greeks is not the same as "being" Greeks. Just because one "wants to be a Greek" does not mean one has the right to lay claim to the Ancient Greek heritage just as I have no right to lay claim to my neighbour´s house just because I "want" to be his brother!

This leads to the very important legal question; if these people are Greek because they want to be Greek and they are Macedonian because they want to be Macedonian, then legally what right do they have to either the Ancient Greek heritage or to the Ancient Macedonian heritage? Given that we have proven that the Modern Greeks are "not Greek at all" what moral and legal right do they have to interfere in the affairs of the Macedonian people? More importantly, as Macedonians and rightful heirs to the Macedonian heritage, why are we allowing these imposters to interfere in our affairs? Isn´t it about time to tell them to "hit the road and mind their own business"?

On the so-called "name dispute" Osiris wrote:

The only name that is logical and natural for Macedonia is Macedonia!

We as people are of Macedonia, which has been called Macedonia for at least two millennia, and that is beyond dispute. All other names are politically inspired propaganda coming from our Balkan neighbours which are debatable and will never be resolved because they are based on conflicting historical myths.

The fact that all our neighbours covet the remaining piece of Macedonia tells us that they all want it for themselves, and would do and say anything to get it even destroy an independent Macedonia. They incorporated it into their own nation.

It seems like its 1900´s all over again; a political Balkan ground hog day.

For those who are still not convinced that the Modern Greek identity is an artificial creation, please continue to read this series of articles.

Author´s note:
Dear Macedonians, one way to defend ourselves from the Greek onslaught and gain back our identity and dignity is to fight back to the level to which the Greeks have reduced us; that is to attack their identity as they have attacked ours. We need prove nothing to them except to expose them as the artificial identity they truly are and to uncover their design to wipe us out in order to usurp our Macedonian heritage.

ATHENS — Not long before the new Acropolis Museum opened last weekend, the writer Christopher Hitchens hailed in this newspaper what he called the death of an argument.

Britain used to say that Athens had no adequate place to put the Elgin Marbles, the more than half of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments that Lord Elgin spirited off when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire two centuries ago. Since 1816 they have been prizes of the British Museum. Meanwhile, Greeks had to make do with the leftovers, housed in a ramshackle museum built in 1874.

So the new museum that Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect, has devised near the base of the Acropolis is a $200 million, 226,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rebuttal to Britain’s argument.

From certain angles it has all the charm and discretion of the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan. Neighbors have been complaining all the way to the bank, housing values having shot up because of it.

Inside, however, it is light and airy, and the collection is a miracle. Weathered originals from the Parthenon frieze, the ones Elgin left behind, are combined with plaster casts of what’s in London to fill the sun-drenched top floor of the museum, angled to mirror the Parthenon, which gleams through wraparound windows. The clash between originals and copies makes a not-subtle pitch for the return of the marbles. Greece’s culture minister, Antonis Samaras, on the occasion of the opening last week, said what Greek officials have been saying for decades: that the Parthenon sculptures, broken up, are like a family portrait with “loved ones missing.” Mr. Samaras’s boss, Greece’s president, Karolos Papoulias, spoke less metaphorically: “It’s time to heal the wounds of the monument with the return of the marbles which belong to it.”

Don’t bet the British will agree.

Inside the museum visitors ascend as if up the slope of the Acropolis via a glass ramp that reveals, underfoot, ancient remains excavated during the building’s construction. (They will eventually be opened to the public.) It’s a nice touch. On the second floor archaic and early classical statues mill about a big gallery like a crowd in an agora, a curatorial and architectural whimsy that risks visitors missing works like the “Kritios Boy,” which nearly hides to one side.

As for the caryatids from the Erechtheion and the sculptural remains of the Temple of Athena Nike, including the sexy “Sandal Binder,” works of textbook import, they look a bit stranded on a balcony and in a passageway because the museum, save for the Parthenon floor, doesn’t have regular spaces. Free circulation puts everything on equal footing (this is the birthplace of democracy, after all), but the flip side of this layout is the failure to make priorities clear, which art museums exist to do.

That said, Athens needs new modern landmarks. The city is choked by slapdash buildings thrown up after the junta fell during the early 1970s. Public monuments ape ancient palaces, badly. Nikos Dimou, a prominent writer here, recalled that when a show of the British modern sculptor Henry Moore arrived years ago: “People complained about bringing monstrous forms to the land of beauty. Ninety percent of cultured Greeks even today live with this classical sensibility.”

A generation or two of well-traveled, environmentally conscious, globally wired Greeks has since come of age, and the Elgin Marbles debate now represents a kind of luxury that Greece has earned. It began with the actress Melina Mercouri during the 1980s, her publicity campaign coinciding with the rise of a populist leader, Andreas Papandreou, whose slogan was “Greece for the Greeks.” It has evolved into a less glamorous tangle of diplomatic and legal maneuverings, with Greece lately recovering some 25 antiquities from various countries, including some additional stray fragments from the Parthenon.

“This issue unifies us,” Dimitris Pandermalis, the Acropolis Museum’s director, said the other day, never mind that surveys show how few of them actually bother to visit the Acropolis past grade school.

As to whether Elgin had legal authority to remove the marbles, the Ottomans being the ruling power, as the British maintain, Mr. Pandermalis paused. “The problem is not legal,” he decided. “It’s ethical and cultural.” George Voulgarakis, a former culture minister, wasn’t so circumspect when asked the same question. He said, “It’s like saying the Nazis were justified in plundering priceless works of art during the Second World War.”

“I understand what museums fear,” Mr. Voulgarakis added. “They think everything will have to go back if the marbles do. But the Acropolis is special.”

That’s what the Greeks have insisted for years when arguing why the marbles belong to Greece, but they also say the marbles belong to the world when pointing out why they don’t belong to the British. The marbles in fact belonged to the Parthenon, a building here and nowhere else, the best argument for repatriation, except the idea now is not to reattach them where they came from but to move them from one museum to another, from the British Museum to the new Acropolis Museum, albeit next door — a different matter, if not to the Greeks.

“It’s the fault of a German,” Mr. Dimou said about Greek pride in this cause. He was referring to Johann Winckelmann, the 18th-century German art historian whose vision of an ancient Greece “populated by beautiful, tall, blond, wise people, representing perfection,” as Mr. Dimou put it, was in a sense imposed on the country to shape modern Greek identity.

“We used to speak Albanian and call ourselves Romans, but then Winckelmann, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Delacroix, they all told us, ‘No, you are Hellenes, direct descendants of Plato and Socrates,’ and that did it. If a small, poor nation has such a burden put on its shoulders, it will never recover.”

This myth required excavators on the Acropolis during the 19th century to erase Ottoman traces and purify the site as the crucible of classicism. The Erechtheion had been a harem, the Parthenon a mosque. “But Greek archaeology has always been a kind of fantasy,” Antonis Liakos, a leading Greek historian, noted the other day. The repatriation argument, relying on claims of historical integrity, itself distorts history.

For their part, the British also point out that the marbles’ presence in London across two centuries now has its own perch on history, having influenced neo-Classicism and Philhellenism around the globe. That’s true, and it’s not incidental that the best editions of ancient Greek texts are published by British, French, Americans and Germans, not Greeks. But imperialism isn’t an endearing argument.

So both sides, in different ways, stand on shaky ground. Ownership remains the main stumbling block. When Britain offered a three-month loan of the marbles to the Acropolis Museum last week on condition that Greece recognizes Britain’s ownership, Mr. Samaras swiftly countered that Britain could borrow any masterpiece it wished from Greece if it relinquished ownership of the Parthenon sculptures. But a loan was out.

Pity. Asked whether the two sides might ever negotiate a way to share the marbles, Mr. Samaras shook his head. “No Greek can sign up for that,” he said.

Elsewhere, museums have begun collaborating, pooling resources, bending old rules. The British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and other great public collectors of antiquity have good reason to fear a slippery slope if the marbles ever do go back, never mind what the Greeks say.

At the same time the Acropolis Museum plays straight to the heart, sailing past ownership issues into the foggy ether of a different kind of truth. It’s the nobler, easier route.

Looting antiquities obviously can’t be tolerated. Elgin operated centuries ago in a different climate. The whole conversation needs to be reframed. As Mr. Dimou asked, “If they were returned, would Greeks be wiser, better? Other objects of incredible importance are scattered around Greece and no one visits them.” Mr. Liakos put it another way: “It’s very Greek to ask the question. Who owns history? It’s part of our nationalist argument. The Acropolis is our trademark. But the energy spent on antiquity drains from modern creativity.”

The new museum finally casts Melina Mercouri’s old argument in concrete.

So, some have estimated that, when the Ottomans conquered the whole Greek territory in the XV century, some 45% of it was populated by Albanians (Trudgill, 1975:6). Another wave of Muslim Albanian migrations took place during the Ottoman period, mainly in the XVIII century (Trudgill, 1975:6; Banfi, 1994:19).

Athens
This question has been asked several times, and should be addressed properly once and for all. While I will agree that pockets of Romaic-speakers lived in what were to become the domains of the modern 'Hellenic' state and elsewhere in the Balkans, particularly where it concerns the main trading areas (where as it so happens the Romaic tongue was the lingua franca of trade) and cities, the number of these people steadily increased in other areas due to the prohibition of Slavic and Latin languages in churches and schools from the second half of the 18th century. So it is not suprising that come the 19th century western travellers and writers speak about so-called 'Greeks' forming large bulks of the population in the region, although the people of other 'origins' were not by and large ignored either, as they are so blindly today.

In the early 19th century John Cam Hobhouse, quoted by John Freely, wrote that "the number of houses in Athens is supposed to be between twelve and thirteen hundred; of which about four hundred are inhabited by the Turks, the remainder by the Greeks and Albanians, the latter of whom occupy above three hundred houses."

During the mid 19th century, Edmond About wrote that "Athens, twenty-five years ago, was only an Albanian village. The Albanians formed, and still form, almost the whole of the population of Attica; and within three leagues of the capital, villages are to be found where Greek is hardly understood.........Albanians form about one-fourth of the population of the country; they are in majority in Attica, in Arcadia, and in Hydra...."

82.History of the Greek Revolution by George Finlay, Published by W. Blackwood and sons, 1861

"The first modern Greek national government, established in 1833, had certain unique attributes. Even though the ''Greeks'' had themselves conducted a bitter revolutionary war against the Ottoman, the three great powers -- Russia, Britain and France -- were responsible for the establishment of a political system in 1833 in which ''Greek'' nationals (mostly Albanians) occupied non of the major government positions.

Instead the newly independant country was organized as an absolte monarchy, under the rule of the 18 year old Bavarian Prince, Othon, with three Bavarian regents hold the real power in the new state... In addition, the ''Greek" (i.e., Albanian) forces were disbanded and the chief military prop of the government was a foreign mercenary army of thirty five hundred men recruited in the German states ..."

On March 13th 1821, twelve days before the official beginning of the War of Independence, the first revolutionary flag was actually raised on the island of Spetses by Laskarina Bouboulina. Twice widowed with 7 children but extremely rich she owned several ships. On April 3rd Spetses revolted, followed by the islands of Hydra and Psara with a total of over 300 ships between them. Bouboulina and her fleet of 8 ships sailed to Nafplion and took part in the seige of the impregnable fortress there. Her later attack on Monemvasia managed to capture that fortress. She took part in the blockade of Pylos and brought supplies to the revolutionairies by sea. Bouboulina became a national hero, one of the first women to play a major role in a revolution. Without her and her ships the Greeks might not have gained their independence. What is less well known is that she was Albanian.And according to some Kolokotronis created the flag, another Albanian!

90. EDINBURGH REVIEW or CRITICAL JOURNAL for: July-October 1902

91.ROMANISM AND COSTES PALAMAS
John S. Romanides
First published in Greek 1976
Made and printed in Greece by
George Papageorgiou Printing Co., Thessaloniki

Romans, Hellenes and the constitutions
Аccording to the early constitutions of 1822-1832 the Hellenic nations is not a nation already in existence with a part of it in revolt and a part not in revolt.

Hellenes are the native born provincials of the old Roman province of Hellas.

In other words the provincial name became the national name.

The right to become Hellene was given to the Romans in revolt in other places, but only on condition that they come and settle permanently in Hellas, Therefore, the Romans outside of Hellas are not considered constitutionally Hellenes because they fought, but only if and when they come and settle in Hellas[33].

It must be appropriately noted that the other Romans were not much disturbed at the fact that the Hellenes of Hellas constitutionally named only themselves Hellenes, since this was a provincial and . They were rather scandalized by the fact that followers of Koraes worked fanatically to pull the nails out of and dissolve Romanism and to separate the self-created new Church of Hellas from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as though it were not right for Hellenes to belong to a Roman Patriarch.
...Romanism bilingual till today
The Franks, as well as Europeans and Russians who followed were not able to understand how it was possible for Romans to become Hellenes and for Hellenes to become Romans with both being fused into one nation with Hellenic Civilization and with two language instead of one, as approximated in the case of Switzerland today.

It is known that Romanism had two official languages, Latin and Greek. Latin is called Romaika and Greek came to be known as Romaika[43]. The same with one iota means Latin and with two iota means Hellenic ; thus the same name signifies the two languages of Romanism.

But Romanism is still bilingual today. This is so because the Vlachic language spoken in Greece is Neo-Latin or Neo Romaika and the Arvanitic (Albanian) language spoken in Greece is approximately 50% Latin and 25-30% Hellenic. Some years ago it was common for Romans in the Balkans to be bilingual and many times trilingual. The Romaik language was prevalent.

The largest group of revolutionaries of 1821 were the Arvanite (Albanian) Romans of whom many did not even know Greek.

92.Albania, rise of a Kingdom von J.Swire, New York 1971

93."The Usable Past"
2003 By K.S Brown & Professor Yannis Hamilakis

Seite 140:
"..As a result of a number of historical factors, much of the rural population in central Greece was Albanian-speaking by the time of the creation of modern Greek state in the 1830s"

[At The Peace Conferance]
Seite 346:
"...Venizelos advanced the famous theory of national consciousness as the test of nationality..."One may be temped", he said, "to raise the objection that a substantial portion of the Greek population uses ALBANIAN as its mother tongue, and is, consequently, in all probability, of Albanian orgin"

95. POLITICS IN MODERN GREECE
By Keith R. Legg

Seite 86:
LANGUAGE
"..At the time of independence, the range in local dialects was significant; substantial portions of the population spoke Albanian"

Seite: 38
"..This preoccupation with Greekness only really began after the War of Independence (1830), when defining what it meant to be Greek became a vital element in creating a new state - Their first capital was the smart little Peloponnesian port Nafplio. It was thought to be far more suitable than the goat-infested ruins and the insignificant, predominantly Turkish-Albanian settlement which existed in 1900-century Athens"

97. THE BODY IMPOLTIC - Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hiararchy of Value

98. History of the Byzantine Empire 324-1453
Band 1 Von Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Vasilʹev